


Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

by wanttobeatree



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Furbies, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 10:50:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It dawns on Abbie that Ichabod only has one change of clothes, so she takes him shopping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

**Author's Note:**

> FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HE ONLY HAS ONE CHANGE OF CLOTHES. Originally posted [on tumblr](http://frightfullytreeish.tumblr.com/post/62935721859/here-is-stupid-little-sleepy-hollow-fic-ichabod) a few days ago, now a wee bit edited.

It’s after a morning spent wrestling some kind of spiky demon-ghoul thing, which had way too many teeth and not enough mouthwash for Abbie’s liking, when Ichabod asks for a needle and thread.

They’re in their batcave (“Have we an infestation?” Ichabod had asked, nervously, the first time she called it that); Abbie looking through Corbin’s files for some kind of prediction of what shit’s going to hit the fan next; Ichabod fussing around with the cuffs of his ridiculous coat. After the day they’ve had, it doesn’t seem like such an odd request, so Abbie just waves a hand vaguely without looking up from the filing cabinet.

“I don’t carry a sewing kit on me,” she says. “But I guess you might find something in all this junk.”

“It is certainly an eclectic collection,” Ichabod agrees. “And a poorly organised one.”

Abbie turns her attention back to Corbin’s map, only half-listening to the sounds of Ichabod shifting junk around; things rattling, something falling over with a thud, Ichabod muttering to himself about the future.

“What do you want to sew, anyway?” she asks after a while.

“Ah.” Ichabod pops up from behind a stack of boxes and extends his arm towards her, displaying a long tear in his coat sleeve. “The beast’s claws were sharp. But it is no matter; it will be easily mended, if I can find the tools.”

Abbie purses her lips. It’s been a few weeks since Ichabod appeared and her life took a turn for the freaking bizarre, everything happening so fast she’s never had a chance to stop and think about it, but – she looks him up and down. A few weeks. One change of clothes.

“Okay,” she says, dumping her files back into the cabinet. “We are going shopping _right now_ and we’re getting you some new clothes.”

She tugs her jacket on, locks the filing cabinet up and heads for the door. When she looks back over her shoulder, Ichabod is laughing.

“It is only a tear, lieutenant.”

“You wore the same clothes for two hundred years,” she says. “Buried in a _cave_.”

“Well...” He gazes down at his faded shirtfront. “Your concerns may be valid.”

 

*

 

For the fifth time since they got here, Abbie looks around and finds that Ichabod is no longer behind her. Rolling her eyes, she backtracks her steps until she spots him staring into the window of a toy store. It’s a Saturday afternoon and the mall is busy, packed with families, but everyone is giving Ichabod a wide berth and anxious glances. With his torn coat, weird clothes and intense fascination with the toy store, Abbie figures who can blame them. She hurries up to Ichabod and elbows him in the side.

“Hello, lieutenant,” he says without looking up.

“See, this is why you need new clothes,” she hisses. “You look like a hobo with way too much interest in toys. You’re lucky nobody’s called for security – or the police.”

“But the police are already here,” Ichabod murmurs. He’s hunched down, his face only a few inches from the glass.

“Someone other than me, I mean, and – Okay, what are you staring at?”

Wordlessly, Ichabod points at the window. Abbie leans in closer, following the direction of his finger, and Ichabod tilts his head towards her.

“It _blinked_ ,” he breathes into her ear.

Abbie stares at it. 

“It’s a Furby.”

“You know of them?” he whispers. “Are they dangerous?”

“They’re toys,” she says, her voice cracking. She clears her throat and adds, steadier, “You know, for children?”

Ichabod leans in closer until his nose is pressed against the glass, his eyes staring deeply into the Furby’s eyes, and for a moment neither of them moves. Abbie looks around and smiles pleasantly at the passers-by who stare at Ichabod. Then the Furby wakes up again, its eyes rolling and its ears wiggling and its mouth opening and closing, and Ichabod flings himself away from the glass with a yelp of surprise. Abbie covers her mouth with her hand, her shoulders shaking with laughter.

“You give these to _children?_ ” he hisses, looking appalled.

Abbie shakes her head and wipes her eyes. Through the window, the Furby is still dancing and the sight of it makes her lips twitch again.

“Come on,” she says, grabbing hold of a handful of Ichabod’s coat and towing him away from the window, towards the nearest clothes store. “It’s okay, they’re mechanical. Like the toaster, remember?”

“Ah,” Ichabod says darkly, shooting one last suspicious look back over his shoulder. “The _toaster_.”

 

*

 

In the menswear, Ichabod walks around and around the racks of pants with a morose expression. He rubs fabric between his fingers and stares suspiciously at all the sneakers. Abbie catches the eye of the nearest store employee, whose expression is almost as confused as Ichabod’s, and smiles and nods.

“We need to talk to Irving about getting you some kind of salary,” she tells Ichabod, who has picked up a pair of sunglasses and is staring at them intently. “I guess you’re technically working for us now. You can be my assistant or something. I don’t know – you don’t have a social security number or a birth certificate or anything. This isn’t exactly a normal occurrence.”

Ichabod slips the sunglasses onto his face and then immediately tugs them off again.

“What purpose do these serve?”

“They’re for sunny weather,” she says, and Ichabod puts them on again, tilting his head back to stare up at the lights; he makes a pleased sound. “Have you seen anything you like? I’ll pay for now. We can probably call it a work expense.”

“I like these,” he says, still looking up at the lights.

Abbie rolls her eyes. She wanders down the aisle to poke through a rack of jeans and tug out a few likely pairs. When she glances back over her shoulder, Ichabod is lifting the shades up and down over his eyes. The store employee is watching him with her eyebrows raised.

“He’s British,” Abbie whispers to her, and the girl nods in wide-eyed understanding.

Abbie carries her armful of denim back to Ichabod and thrusts it at him. He grabs a pair of jeans and holds them up, lifting the sunglasses to rest on the top of his head. He tugs at the belt loops, raises an eyebrow and cautiously rubs the denim.

“What fabric is this?”

“Denim. Very practical.”

Ichabod nods, fiddling with the zipper. He tugs it up a half inch and his mouth drops open when the teeth knit together. He lifts it up closer to his face and runs his fingers over the teeth, then he pulls the zipper up and down a few more times.

“Ingenious,” he breathes.

“You know, I guess it is.” She looks around the store – Ichabod playing with the zipper again behind her – until she spots the changing rooms in the corner. She nudges him. “Look, go try these on. You can get a couple pairs once we know your size. The vintage thing is in right now.”

“The what?”

“Your...” She waves a hand at his own clothes. “Frock coats and suspenders. I mean, you’ll look like a hipster – it’s, never mind. But if you want to keep looking something like... like what you’re used to.”

His hand stills on the zipper at last and he looks down at her out of the corner of his eyes, head cocked towards her. He smiles. The sunglasses are still propped on the top of his head.

“Perhaps a mix of old and new?” he says. “I would like to understand more of this time.”

“Okay,” Abbie says, with a nod.

She catches the same store employee on their way to the changing rooms and murmurs, “Look, I just need to run an errand, can you keep an eye on my friend? Help him find some things? He doesn’t know his sizes. He’s-”

“British,” she echoes.

“Right.”

She nudges Ichabod towards the changing rooms and the store employee, who smiles kindly up at him. As Abbie turns and heads back out of the store, she hears her say, “So you’re from England?”

“Correct.”

“So have you ever like, met the Queen?”

“Ah, there's a Queen now, is there?”

 

*

 

The second they’re back in the car, Ichabod starts digging into his bags of new clothes. He pulls out a pack of underwear and starts testing the elasticity of the waistbands, looking fascinated.

“Don’t _play_ with them,” Abbie groans, buckling her seatbelt.

Ichabod shoots her an offended look, waistband stretched between his hands as far as it will go, but he lowers the underwear back down again and examines the packaging instead. Abbie rolls her eyes.

“Seatbelt,” she reminds him. 

“Ah yes.” He tugs it down carefully and slots it into place, and then he picks the cellophane up again, crinkling it in his hands. “Plastic is most peculiar.”

“Yup. Useful, though.” She pulls out of the parking space and adds, “Don’t put it on your face, okay? You’ll suffocate and die.”

“Why on Earth would I do such a thing?”

Abbie shrugs. “Hell if I know. I’m just saying, everyone learns it when they’re kids, but you haven’t, so: don’t.”

They swing out of the parking lot and into the traffic. Ichabod holds tightly onto the seatbelt strap, staring out the window at the buildings and the passing cars.

“I have survived this far in the future, have I not?” he says. “Despite your toasters and your cars.”

“You wore the same clothes for three weeks,” she says. “Dunno if I’d call that _surviving_.”

“I did wash the dirt off in the sink.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

Ichabod chuckles. His grip on the seatbelt is still very tight and he braces himself against the door when they turn a corner. Abbie watches him in the rear-view mirror.

“I don’t know how you do this,” she says, at last.

“What have I done?”

“Adapted, I guess? Stayed calm. You’re in the future! You’re – Your world has completely changed in the blink of an eye. I can’t even imagine it, I would be a mess.”

“But your world has changed too.” He turns in his seat to look at her, when she doesn’t reply, and adds, “Has it not? You were going to your Quantico, and now your sheriff is dead and you are battling monsters. And you have done it admirably, Lieutenant Mills.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Perhaps not. But General Washington has readied us for danger and unnatural occurrences. This is... not quite what I had expected, I will confess. But Katrina guides me in my dreams, and you guide me in my waking hours.”

He smiles at her warmly, rooting around in his shopping bags again.

Abbie clears her throat. “So, what you’re saying is... ‘it could be worse’?”

“The world could have ended. This is infinitely preferable. Ah!”

With a satisfied exclamation, he pulls the sunglasses out of his bag. He slips them onto his nose and beams at her.

“You got those? You actually got sunglasses?”

“I was curious.”

“I can’t believe you bought sunglasses.”

He lifts them up off his face and stares at the sky, then drops them back down again. He hums in contentment. “They seem very useful. And what did _you_ get, lieutenant?”

“Huh?”

“On your errand?”

“Oh.” Abbie shakes her head. “It’s dumb, now.”

Ichabod lifts an eyebrow at her over the top of his sunglasses. “I would like to see.”

“Okay, fine. Hang on, there’s some parking up ahead.”

Sighing, she pulls into the parking space and unbuckles her seatbelt. She reaches into the back and pulls out a bag, then pulls out a box from the bag. She dumps it unceremoniously in Ichabod’s lap. He stares down at it.

“Do you _delight_ in tormenting me?” he asks weakly. He lifts the box up to face height and stares deeply into the Furby’s eyes.

“Maybe I do.”

He turns his head towards her, an expression of such deep sorrow in his eyes that she bursts out laughing again, shaking her head and hiding her eyes.

“Sorry, sorry,” she gasps. She sucks in a deep breath, lets it out slowly and lowers her hand. “I thought I could take it apart for you and prove to you it’s not real. It’s just a creepy toy. Enough monsters in the world without this one haunting your dreams, right?”

“Indeed.” Ichabod shakes the box and narrows his eyes at the Furby over his sunglasses. “I would like to see how it works.”

“Okay. I’ll get my toolbox out when we get home. Maybe,” she adds, with a smirk, pulling out into the road again, “I could show you how the toaster works, too.”

“Do you think it wise?”

“Only one way to find out.”


End file.
